


Georgie, Attack!

by arboreal_overlords



Category: Wooden Overcoats
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Chapman is Extra, Chapman is MI5, Gen, Georgie is ALSO MI5, M/M, Slightly Supernatural Piffling Vale, georgie is great at everything, is it though?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-04-17 15:45:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14192376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arboreal_overlords/pseuds/arboreal_overlords
Summary: “His username is Chapman?” Eric asked disbelievingly.Georgie grinned in anticipation“His password is ALSO Chapman?”“Still think he’s a national security threat?” she asked smugly.Or, the one where Chapman and Georgie are both MI5 agents sent undercover to surveil the weird shit of Piffling Vale. One of them is taking their orders more seriously.





	1. Should You Choose to Accept It

**Author's Note:**

> Look, I know that “Chapman is ex-MI5/MI6 “ is practically canon at this point, but it would be SO MUCH BETTER if Georgie was also MI5 and this entire podcast has been the background to their spy battles™ as Georgie deals with Chapman’s extra bullshit and his increasingly transparent crush on Rudyard.
> 
> Brought to you by my encroaching dissertation deadlines and the transcendent joy that 3x05 gave me. Also, shoutout to Teen Wolf for the line of dialogue that I gleefully plagiarized in the summary. 
> 
> As always, I don't own Wooden Overcoats.

 

The Piffling Vale file was thick and frayed, the documents at the bottom yellowed with age. Wilted post-it notes stuck out of the reports unevenly, adding parenthetical comments like “Probably a hoax” and “?!?!?!?”

 

It was the most interesting file that Georgie had ever read.

 

To be fair, as a low level agent in MI-5, Georgie didn’t get to read many files. It was mostly “Go here, Georgie,” “Pilot this helicopter, Georgie,” “Tackle that suspect, Georgie.” Piffling Vale was her first long-term assignment, and Georgie suspected that it was supposed to be a punishment after her last interrogation had gotten a little too feisty.

 

Piffling Vale was low on MI-5’s priority, so low that only a handful of agents had been sent out over the years when there were no other significant threats to assess. There had been few documented incidents, but the reports spoke of a permanent unease, a ubiquitous sense of weirdness that plagued every stationed agent since the early 20th century. In the 1960’s, one agent had been killed by a bear, though bears weren’t native to the English Channel. While the attack had been deemed an accident, the agent’s body had been embalmed and buried with alarming promptness.

 

Georgie’s check-in was a retired agent posing as her grandmother on the outskirts of the Island, a woman named Crusoe content to lend Georgie her last name while she conducted a number of geriatric affairs with Piffling residents. “Surveill and report,” the higher-ups had told her. “Make minimal interaction with the inhabitants-- just note anything that seems weird or inexplicable.”

 

The thing is, Georgie isn’t great at “minimal interaction.”

 

She’d been in Piffling Vale a week before she saved Rudyard Funn from being crushed underneath one of his own coffins while trying to tip it into the ground. The rest of the funeral party was watching with tired and slightly resentful nonchalance. Georgie resisted the urge to tip them into the ground as well.

 

“I can be a pallbearer” she offered casually, as the smaller man staggered up from the ground with offended dignity. “I’m great at lifting coffins.”

 

Rudyard glared at her suspiciously. “It won’t pay much.”

 

“That’s fine.”

 

“Possibly it won’t pay at all.”

 

“I’ll be paid with the warmth of your company” Georgie deadpanned, and Rudyard gave her a nervous squint that she later came to associate with his confusion of whether or not he was being mocked.

 

In the end, Georgie couldn't have picked a better place to surveil the goings-on of Piffling Vale. Rudyard and Antigone were so low under the social radar in Piffling that the town seemed to assume that Georgie had always been there. Her “Nana” occasionally doddered in from one of her dates to collect Georgie’s reports, cooing to the townspeople about her precocious youth.

 

Georgie would have felt guilty for using the Funns, except for the fact that she saved their lives roughly twice a week. Rudyard seemed utterly immune to his own fatal ineptitude and had the memory of an belligerent goldfish, except when it came to cataloguing the various grudges and blood feuds he had sparked all over Piffling Vale. He was also surprisingly kind, gentle and cheerful to animals in a way that he wasn’t with humans and brusquely grateful for Georgie’s monosyllabic interactions in a way that telegraphed crushing loneliness.

 

Antigone was a different story, The week that she thought up scented embalming fluid, Antigone didn’t emerge from the basement for 72 hours before Georgie marched town with a turkey sandwich and her best interrogatory scowl.

 

“You can just set it there, Georgie,” Antigone said, waving her hand airly to an unspecified area of the room as she crouched with a dropper over a vat of roilling, emollient liquid.

 

“No,” Georgie said firmly.

 

“Why not?”

 

“You’ll probably try to embalm it.”

 

Antigone blinked. “Well. yes. Fair point.” She stood up, wincing to the crackle of bones and joints. She suddenly seemed more present in the room, more solid, less like a projection of a human. Georgie tried not to think too hard about what that might mean, despite the repeated mentions in the Piffling Vale file of the Funn funeral home as a center of all of the weirdness. Antigone was despondent and bitingly clever, and while she seemed most at home with death, she hadn’t made anyone that way. There were worse things to be at home with.

 

Georgie began leaving out key information in her reports. She didn’t mention that Rudyard had a new animal companion, a mouse named Madeline that he could seemingly communicate with. Antigone sometimes literally disappeared, melted into the shadows with more than just shyness and bad posture. Georgie pretended not to notice. Her reports grew more and more sparse, bulleted observations of the noises of the uranium mine or the behavior patterns of the feral owl sanctuary.

 

Eventually, she simply ceased submitting them. She liked it here, liked that she could rest in the cool shadows of Funn funerals, studying Catalan or year-old crosswords while Rudyard offended half the town and Antigone worked in the basement. The room hummed with the comforting rhythm of the embalming machine, and Georgie relaxed in the proximity of death.

 

Of course, she should have known that it couldn’t last forever. Two months later, Eric Chapman blew into Piffling Vale with the subtlety of a category five hurricane.

 

Georgie had known him only by reputation, before. The name “Chapman” had been bandied around the agency, with either dreamy admiration or a heavy eye roll-- his exploits were department legend and probably highly exaggerated. Her ex Nadia had once referred to him as the “Gilderoy Lockhart of MI5,” a fact that Georgie would have liked to share with Rudyard, were she not posing as a youthful slacker.

 

Rudyard had also called the Harry Potter series “satanic tomfoolery,” so it was probably just as well.

 

Despite his many apparent accomplishments as an MI-5 agent, it became clear in his first days in Piffling Vale that Chapman had never been undercover in his life. He answered basic questions with cryptic sighs and vague responses like “It was all a long time ago,” as if his last MI-5 posting was a distant, tragic memory rather than last week. Of course, Chapman’s attempts to seem intriguingly opaque increased tenfold when Rudyard Funn was within hearing distance, which meant that Georgie got the full force of his brooding shite by association. He may as well have had a neon sign overhead that says “ASK ME ABOUT MY MYSTERIOUS PAST.”

 

Chapman’s persistence in trying to get her alone to talk was embarrassing. After days of yelling invitations at the back of Georgie’s retreating motorcycle, he still seemed to be under the impression that Georgie simply doesn’t recognize him, that she hadn’t pieced together the _glaringly obvious signs_ that Chapman had arrived as her replacement, or possibly her handler,

 

When Chapman finally asked her to coffee, he gave her so many significant glances that she agreed to keep the Funns from getting suspicious. Rudyard gleefully appointed her their “spy on the inside,” unwittingly making the first truly funny joke of his adult life.

 

“You know, Georgie, stop me if I’m getting personal, but I’m _surprised you’re still here_ ,” Chapman says casually at the cafe, his eyes comically wide and locked on to hers as if trying to beam his secret identity into her brain. Georgie wanted to throttle him. Madeline intervened.

 

In the resulting catastrophe that that was their intelligence-briefing-disguised-as-a-date, Chapman seemed to finally give up on establishing their secret partnership, though he trailed after her forlornly for several days afterwards.

 

Unfortunately, this was around the same time that Chapman learned that Rudyard could talk to animals, Rudyard decided that Chapman was his arch-nemesis, and Georgie let go of her initial hopes that Chapman would beat a swift departure, and started trying her hand at sabotage. She was _great_ at sabotage. 


	2. Red Light, Green Light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the massive delay (especially to the people in April to whom I hinted I was going to upload soon, yikes). Thank you for all of your comments, they reminded me periodically that I needed to take a break from dissertating to finish this. 
> 
> Also the Wooden Overcoats season finale played my emotions like a beautiful and cruel symphony, so I needed time to recover from crying openly and unexpectedly in the shampoo aisle of CVS. 
> 
> ALSO: if you hadn't already noticed, this fic is going to be a lot of Slytherin!Chapman. He's less of a dick to Georgie in later chapters though, I promise.

For the next several months, Georgie participated in two separate sabotage campaigns against Eric Chapman. The first, orchestrated by the Funns, comprised of a series of uniquely terrible plans to steal Chapman’s clients and halt his seemingly unstoppable success.

 

One week, Rudyard forced her to plant rumors that Chapman was a sexual deviant. “Say that he has some sort of unnatural fetish for, I don’t know, caffeine or warm socks,” he said, his eyes alight with destructive glee while Antigone groaned and covered the ears of the corpse she was embalming.

 

Predictably, the rumors made Chapman even more popular than he already was.

 

“Hey Georgie, any idea why people keep on handing me socks?”  Chapman asked the next morning, holding an entire fistful of brightly colored cotton warily while Rudyard fumed several yards away behind a tree. “Am I not wearing the right kind? Is this like that thing with the business trousers?”

 

“Not a clue” Georgie replied, turning away quickly and mounting her bike. If Chapman kept on being besieged by intrigued townspeople, she could cut his phone wire again before he arrived home.

 

This bit of electrical fiddling was part of the second and much more effective sabotage campaign against Chapman, one that might technically count as high treason. Georgie hadn’t been paying too much attention during her MI5 training, but actively undermining another agent’s mission was probably at least a felony.

 

On the other hand, Chapman couldn’t be allowed to communicate with whatever higher-ups on the mainland were still cautiously interested in potentially supernatural activity. Yesterday, Madeline had gotten into a particularly iffy dust-up with an overconfident vole, and Rudyard had been forced to act as referee, sitting down in the dust next to the sidewalk and occasionally making murmuring sounds of empathy while the vole chittered.

 

Chapman had glared at her and gestured belligerently with his chin as the rest of Piffling Vale sighed wearily and skirted by.

 

“Got a problem with voles, Chapman?” Georgie had asked innocently, while throwing a bag of firewood over her shoulder with more than necessary violence.

 

No, Chapman couldn’t be trusted not to frame Rudyard’s gifts with animals or Antigone’s occasional disappearance to MI5 in the worst possible light. Luckily, wifi on Piffling was heavily regulated, after finding out that it caused odd readings from the Uranium Mine. And while Chapman was the type of smug bastard to probably have an excellent data plan, he wouldn’t be able to use it anywhere besides the Reverend’s bathroom.

 

The Reverend was currently battling a sudden onset of lactose intolerance. Georgie actually really did feel bad about that part—  but the ends and the means and whatever.

 

It wasn’t until Georgie saw Chapman walking out of the post office with a sense of cheery satisfaction that she realized that he could be mailing his reports. Rudyard, who thought the electric kettle was the apex of technological development, would be disappointed in her for forgetting about snail mail.

 

This would require a different form of sabotage, and some assistance. Luckily, Georgie was well-acquainted with the criminal underbelly of Piffling Vale.

 

                                                                                                  —- —— —- — ——- — —— —- —- —

 

“Evening, lot,” she said later that night, stepping into Piffling’s lone bus stop and shaking the rain off of her coat. “You got it?”

 

“Hey, Georgie,” the hoodlums chorused, sitting casually amidst what looked like a half-built model of a medieval trebuchet.

 

“Are the ethics of war, like, dependant on the power of mankind’s weapons, do you think?” one of them asked casually while adjusting the counterweight.

 

“Dunno,” Georgie said. “Nice trebuchet, though.”

 

“Thanks,” they mumbled, and one gestured to a brown envelope sitting on the nearby bench.

 

“Do I want to know how you got hold of this?” Georgie asked the hoodlum wearing the red hoodie.

 

He shrugged. “I help out the postman sometimes. I like to be near material communication, you know? Letter writing is a dying art.”

 

“Whatever, cheers,” Georgie said, turning away as the hoodlums descended into debate about the death of epistolary form.

 

She kept the envelope under her coat all the way home, saving it from the rain and other people’s eyes. It was addressed to the London headquarters in Chapman’s precise and blocky handwriting, without a return address.

 

She cut it open with her trusty machete  and shook out the contents. The papers were meticulously organized and stapled, the writing beginning with the same neat, blocky script on the address label. Georgie had written a lot of reports in her time— she was _great_ at intelligence paperwork— and she recognized the format of Chapman’s cover pages.

 

However, the reports tended to be a maximum of three pages. Chapman’s stack looked like the beginnings of a Dickensian novel.

 

“What,” Georgie said, looking down at the increasingly tangled shape of Chapman’s notes, “the fuck.”

 

**E.G. CHAPMAN, NOVEMBER LOG, PIFFLING VALE**

 

  * Communication with mainland spotty- is it possible that R.F. is tampering with my electricity? Is this further signs of his abnormal abilities?
  * R.F. continues to say my name in an aggravated manner every time I enter a room. Is this some sort of incantation or code?
  * V. T. proving valuable source of information, though seems confused why I keep asking about R.F.
  * R.F.’s animal cohort (Madeline) seems harmless but is often writing things down (?) might be a source of surveillance.
  * Town archives don’t have a cause of death for Funn parents, though Funn Funerals handled both services (yikes). Possible mysterious circumstances/backstory??
  * G.C. continues to be under some sort of thrall or lethargy???? Will not respond to attempts to trade intelligence. Amnesia? Mind Control?  Must investigate further.



 

The pages dissolved into accounts of Chapman’s attempts to extract information about the town archives during his dalliances with Lady Templar (gross) and worryingly detailed sketches of Rudyard’s face. They weren’t half bad, though Rudyard’s petulant annoyance looked more like devious malevolence. Madeline was sometimes perched on his shoulder, looking like the rodential villian in an animated Disney film.

 

Georgie thought about a number of possible modes of response, from fabricating a different report to flagging Chapman’s clearly waning sanity to MI5 herself.

 

Instead, she just kicked his door down after Chapman’s closed for the evening.

 

“Are you even trained by MI5?” Georgie asked angrily, waving Chapman’s notes in his face. “Any chance you just picked up a James Bond novel and thought you’d give it a go?”

 

“Oh, are we talking about this now?” Chapman asked cheerfully, looking up from his pint and newspaper.

 

Georgie growled and grabbed a folding chair from the side of the wall, angrily shaking it out with one arm and sitting backward on it. “Listen to me very carefully Eric, ‘cause I’m only going to say this once. Rudyard Funn is not an evil mastermind.”

 

“Hmm,” Chapman said noncommittally, drawing himself up in his chair in what appeared to be his ‘professional meeting’ mode. “I have eight dead mobile phones that disagree with you there.”

 

“That was—” Georgie stopped. “That was not Rudyard, trust me. Rudyard can barely work a mobile. He still asks for an operator sometimes.”

 

“Come off it, Georgie,” Chapman said with gentle condescension. “Surely you can see through that act.”

 

“What act?”

 

Chapman sighed, and steepled his fingers in a way that made Georgie want to rip out his larynx. “I admit that I was convinced in the beginning, and sure, the bumbling has its charm. But _no one is that incompetent_.”

 

Georgie stared at him in pain. “No, Eric, he really is.” She mentally apologized to Rudyard, who was currently trying to coach pigeons into stealing Chapman’s mail.  

 

“It’s actually quite impressive,” Chapman added, clearly warming to the topic. “I mean, you’ve got the whole village thinking ‘wow, Rudyard Funn, what an absolute disaster, but, you know, a totally harmless disaster,’ when actually he’s been stopping me at every turn.”

 

“He hasn’t,” Georgie pressed. “Eric, right now he’s trying to coach pigeons into stealing your mail.”

 

Chapman smiled fondly. “Yeah, I know, one of them hit my pergola ceiling this morning. I had to coax it back to life with my water bill.” He schooled his face back into a look of professional interest.  “But that’s just his cover— you know, it’ll blow up in his face spectacularly and draw attention away from what he’s really planning.”

 

“He’s not planning anything!” Georgie insisted.

 

“It’s likely that he isn’t working alone,” Chapman said firmly. “What is that mouse doing writing everything down?”

 

“Madeline’s writing a Sunday Times bestseller.”

 

Chapman looked at her with more condescending amusement. “Sure thing.”

 

“It’s true!” Georgie wondered if stealing Madeline’s notes would make her look more or less reliable at this point.  “Look, it’s mostly written on Post-It notes — “

 

“I’m really surprised at you, Georgie,” Chapman interrupted, his brow wrinkling photogenically. “They told me that you were the best. Eccentric in your methods, sure, but not naive.”

 

“Really?” Georgie responded. “They told me _you_ were fairly crap.” She pulled out a page of the report that was just renditions of Rudyard’s eyebrows and held it up with extreme prejudice. “You wouldn’t call this _eccentric in your methods_?”

 

Chapman actually blushed, which was horrifying.

 

“What about Lady Templar, ay?” Georgie continued. “What do you think she would have to say about your methods?”

 

Chapman sat silently with the air of someone who is not angry, just very disappointed. “You may not be willing to help me, Georgie,” he said quietly, “but don’t get in my way.”

 

Georgie didn’t dignify that frankly embarrassing threat with a response, instead grabbing the stack Chapman’s notes with two hands and walking out with the air of someone taking out the garbage after procrastinating for some time.

 

“Enjoy yourself!” Chapman called aggressively through the doorway.

 

“Fuck off!” Georgie replied, ignoring Petunia Bloom’s scandalized look as she stomped to her bike.  

 

                                                                                                                               —- —— —- — ——- — —— —- —- —

 

Georgie burned Chapman’s notes in the Funn’s wood-burning stove.

 

“I thought I could feel my hands again,” Rudyard said cheerily, careening down the stairs. “Did you find some more firewood?”

 

“Just some trash,” Georgie replied, poking the notes aggressively.

 

“Excellent, excellent,” Rudyard said absentmindedly, sitting down on his favorite patch of floor.

 

Georgie stared into the layers of paper shriveling into blackness in the center of the stove. As the pages twitched and turned over, letters briefly became visible, a capitalized ‘P’ or a row of bullet points.

 

“Rudyard,” she asked slowly, “have you always been able to talk to animals?”

 

“Hmm?”

 

“Could you . . . understand other animals like you understand Madeline when you were a kid?”

 

Rudyard shrugged, which from his position on the floor made him look like an indecisive snake. “Oh, I don’t know.” he said. “I didn’t really know any that well.”

 

Georgie opened her mouth, stopped, and closed it again. She resumed staring into the fire.

 

Eventually Antigone was in the room. She didn’t burst up from the basement like she did when Rudyard had made a particularly terrible decision. Instead, she slowly appeared, turning from a particularly thick shadow in the corner into a person, the firelight flickering against her embalming goggles.

 

“Mrs. Wainwright is done,” she said softly. “Her grandson is getting her in the morning, though. I think they’re switching to Chapman’s.”

 

Rudyard groaned and did his floor-wriggle again. “Don't ruin a perfectly nice fire by talking about _Chapman_ , Antigone.” He sat up, the fire and his subject lending unusual color to his face. “Did you see what the man— 

 

Georgie pulled over a threadbare armchair for Antigone, tuning out the sibling’s grumbled debate, and grabbed a throw pillow to sit on from the floor.

 

Tomorrow, she decided, she would figure out what to do about Chapman. With his latest report reduced to cinders, he couldn’t request anything too alarming from MI5 for days. Maybe she could throw him in the Piffling swamp. Maybe Madeline could help.

 

“Madeline,” she called from the floor, breaking though what had apparently turned into a discussion of Chapman’s malevolent jumpers. “How well would you say you knew the Piffling Swamp?”

 

Madeline squeaked something indecipherable from her perch.

 

“Moderately,” Rudyard translated, shooting her a look that communicated his displeasure at being interrupted in the middle of a really good Chapman rant. “But the _blue_ one— “

 

Georgie relaxed, running over the possible ways to make death by peat bog look like an accident. Chapman ran in the mornings, didn’t he? Perhaps Tuesday morning, when Rudyard and Antigone were busy with the Marlowe’s. She didn’t really want to kill Chapman (she didn’t really want to kill anyone), but perhaps a neck-high brush with death was just what Chapman needed to reconsider his interest in Piffling Vale.

 

Tuesday, then. Nothing serious could really go down until Tuesday, anyway.

  
  
Predictably, Monday morning was precisely when everything blew up in Georgie _and_ Chapman’s faces.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay tuned for the moment you've all been waiting for, obviously: the reluctant team up! Rudyard in danger! Chekov's Peat Bog!


End file.
